


Up Next In Sports

by dinolaur



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Domestic Pack, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-23
Updated: 2012-11-23
Packaged: 2017-11-19 07:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinolaur/pseuds/dinolaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Pack notices an interesting personality quirk of Peter's when they gather at the Hale house to watch the game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Up Next In Sports

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually one of my favorite and most ridiculous headcanons for Peter.

Things are calm, which is an entirely odd feeling because things haven’t been calm in Derek’s life since he was sixteen years old. Since the fire, he’s been dealing with his poor decisions causing the deaths of his entire family. He spent years on the run and hiding with Laura, and then there was the whole mystery Alpha who ended up being his supposedly comatose uncle thing. Then the Argents, then the kanima, then the Alpha pack. Just one huge clusterfuck for months and years, but finally, things have settled down some. The Alphas are gone, and there’s a fragile but currently stable peace with the Argents. Scott has accepted Derek as his Alpha, which has brought Allison and Stiles firmly into Derek’s pack and finally cemented Jackson and Lydia as part of the group.

Really, the only thing going on that’s kind of out of place right now is Peter. He’s still around, still acting like he’s pack.

Of course, Derek hasn’t exactly outright said that Peter isn’t. But he hasn’t said that he is either. His feelings about his uncle are understandably mixed. Peter killed Laura and put Derek through months of hell. He was also mentally unstable and to some degree not even in control of his actions at the time. He is in no way a good man, but he’s also Derek’s uncle.  The whole thing is a clusterfuck of its own that Derek tries not to dwell on. It’s easier to just keep one eye on Peter and not be surprised when Peter makes his inevitable move, whatever it might be.

The others seem to mostly feel the same way. The new Betas are the most at ease around Peter, which is understandable as they weren’t there for all of the mess before Christmas. In fact, Erica almost seems to like him. It’s entirely due to Peter’s wit and timing with the sarcastic quips. That’s Erica’s humor. Plus, they both seem to like fashion shows.

Of the older group, Scott glares a lot and fidgets, and Jackson looks like he’s half confused but definitely completely uncomfortable, possibly stemming from not knowing anything about the guy but still setting him on fire. Allison has that same conflicted air that Derek does. Peter is the one who killed her aunt, although he had a fairly justifiable reason. Derek knows that Allison is very disillusioned with who her aunt was, but still loves her because she was her aunt. Derek gets the feeling, but quite frankly, Kate Argent can rot in hell.

Lydia and Stiles are the most confusing to watch around Peter. On the one hand, they both always look like they’re a second away from grabbing the nearest sharp object to put through his eye. On the other, they weirdly get along and work well with him. Derek figures it’s got something to do with if you put all three of them in a room together, you can’t breathe around the sheer genius and overflowing smartass.

So no one really likes Peter, but they’re used to him. They all know their roles around him, and he knows which buttons he can push and which ones will have the pack falling over him with teeth and claws. Of course, considering he’s bigger, faster, and more experienced than any of the others—save Derek, although he’ll always trump Derek on experience—the throw downs don’t usually end with Peter being the one limping away.

But with the peace everyone has settled into their position in the pack, and there’s a feeling of closeness and family that Derek thought he’d never experience again. Some days, he wakes up just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there have been more and more mornings when he opens his eyes that the first thought in his head doesn’t have anything to do with the utter misery he’s been drowning in for six years. It’s surprising and takes the air out of his lungs, but then he goes downstairs and sees his pack lazing around cooking breakfast, and just about everything feels right.

``

Derek is a huge baseball buff. Or, he was when he was a kid. He played Little League in addition to school teams until he got into high school when his father said he needed to not draw any attention to himself through his abilities and that it was an unfair advantage over the rest of the kids on the team. It had sucked, and he’d been full of all the appropriate teenaged indignation, but he’d accepted it and moved on to non-competitive swimming.

He doesn’t like to think about that.

But back to baseball. He’s always been a huge fan, particularly of the Dodgers. Four different birthdays when he was a kid had involved his family getting tickets and them all spending the day down in LA for a game. It had always been just as amazing and perfect as the first time.

Baseball is one of the few things he kept up with after the fire. Derek is the first to admit, he’s a very different person today than he was before he lost it all. He used to be much more relaxed. Sure, he was never the social butterfly that Laura was, but it had been easy to smile and laugh back then. He also used to read and write a lot. His mother would always go over his stories with him and talk about his characters and ideas. He hasn’t picked up a pen—in that sense—in six years. But he kept up with baseball, always having an eye on what his team was doing, who they were signing on, who they traded away, batting averages, and division titles—few as those might have been.

The rest of the pack is aware that he watches baseball. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure out when he had Stiles program the DVR Peter insisted they get—because how else were he and Erica and Lydia going to watch Project Runway if Derek insisted on pack meetings on Thursday evenings—to record all of the Dodgers games.

Kids in Beacon Hills are used to lacrosse being a big thing. The team has been playing and winning championships for the past several years, so they pretty much center their sports awareness on it. Allison is still getting used to the idea, having lived mostly in towns where football was the big thing. Baseball is kind of pretty far off their radars, but the more they see Derek settling in to watch, the more they start joining in. Jackson, Isaac, and Scott complain about how boring it is—and Derek thinks that’s blasphemy, but objectively he gets where they’re coming from; it’s better in person—but finally settle in when Stiles and Lydia tell them to shut up and grab some chips.

It sort of becomes a thing. The pack doesn’t gather to watch all of the games, but when weekends are open, most, if not all of them, find themselves draped over various chairs and couches and even the floor to check out the game. Allison has been playing on something called Pinterest—she’s tried to explain it to Derek, but the internet isn’t his thing—which has been sparking her interest in cooking. Stiles learned the skill when his mother was dying and has only become better over the years, so he tends to watch over her efforts and rush in to save something when she makes a wrong move. Although when it comes to baking, Allison can do things with milk and flour that would make angels weep. Additionally, Boyd is—in Isaac’s reverent words—a grill whisperer. Together, the three of them have decided that when the Hale Pack dines, they dine well, and so the coffee table in front of the TV is always overloaded with snacks and appetizers, and there’s the constant smell of ribs or steaks or chicken cooking coming in from the open windows.

Today’s game isn’t going so well. They’re up against the Giants, which makes it even worse. Derek is stewing on the couch, a bucket of iced beers—which, sure, they don’t really do much for him, but it’s the principle of the matter—at his feet. He keeps having to kick Stiles’s grabby hands away from it. Derek might condone a lot of things that are less than legal and not in the least bit safe for the kids in his pack, but he’s really not about to make it easy for the Sheriff’s seventeen year old son to get drunk. Normal bullets might not kill him, but they do hurt like a bitch.

Most of the pack is lightly talking around watching the game, but Peter, sitting next to Derek on the couch, is completely silent, his eyes narrowed and focused on the screen. The game is close—too close. It’s the bottom of the ninth, all tied up. The Giants are at bat, bases empty with two outs. This is it. This is the moment. The wind up. The pitch.

Son of a bitch, it’s a home run.

It’s silent in the room for all of a fraction of a second before Peter jumps up off the couch and screams, “OH, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT ARE THEY FUCKING PAYING YOU FOR, YOU PIECE OF SHIT? YOU HAD ONE JOB TO DO, ASSHOLE! ONE JOB! YOUR MOTHER IS PUKING! SHE IS PUCKING IN THE STANDS! UGH!”

And he promptly flips the coffee table over, sending food and dips and drinks everywhere, before storming out to the kitchen, a string of obscene curses still flowing strong from his mouth.

Excluding Peter’s not at all muffled curses as he bangs around the cabinets, the house is silent. The pack stares wide eyed and a little bit fearful at the doorway that leads back into the kitchen. It’s only after Peter stomps up the stairs, still ranting, that Stiles finally breaks the silence. “Oh my God,” he half-whispers-half-cries. It comes out as a weirdly high pitched noise that goes along pretty perfectly with his flailing limbs. “What the hell was that?”

Derek is glaring at the screen as it does a third replay of the home run, so it takes him a minute to notice that they’re all staring at him. “What,” he asks, blinking.

“I repeat,” Stiles says. “What the hell was that?”

Derek blinks again. “We lost the game,” he says slowly.

“And what, that means it’s okay to just overturn a table,” Lydia asks. “Because that’s a totally reasonable reaction.”

“My cannoli,” Allison wails, kneeling before the destroyed food in misery. Scott pats her consolingly on the back.

“Who does shit like that,” Jackson asks, glaring at Isaac when he snorts and elbows him.

“Better question is who is going to clean all this up,” Erica says looking at the mess. “Because, as memory serves, I had no part of this foolishness.”

“Yeah, okay, but I still really want to know where the table flipping rage came from,” Stiles says. “Because I’ve only ever seen Peter yell one time, and that was a little bit more of a reasonable response to the situation.”

“You mean when you were jabbering his ears off,” Lydia asks.

“Shut up, you wouldn’t know. You were unconscious,” Stiles retorts.

“Point though,” Boyd interjects before they can go off. “Overreactions aren’t really his MO, you know.”

“Yeah,” Isaac agrees. “He’s more of an okay-well-shit-that-didn’t-go-according-to-plan-but-whatever-I’ve-got-like-twelve-other-nefarious-plots-in-the-works-so-no-biggie kind of guy.”

“But,” Derek says, trying to wrap his head around their concerns, “the Dodgers just lost. Against the Giants.”

Everyone just stares at him, and when Derek realizes it, it hits him like a punch to the gut. He’s not at all perturbed by Peter’s reaction to the game because that was how Peter always reacted to his teams losing when Derek was younger. That was Peter before the fire, his Uncle Peter, the way he should have been.

What Peter is now is a cold and calculating shell of the uncle Derek remembers. His uncle had been lively and fun, still with that sarcastic bite and wicked sense of humor, but he’d never been the type to manipulate and terrorize—at least not to anyone in the pack or undeserving. He’d been the fun uncle, the one who took Laura and Derek to movies, who went to all their sporting events and cheered louder than anyone else, who snuck them extra scoops of ice cream after dinner and let them stay up well past bedtime. He’d take them swimming and tread water in the deep end while they jumped to him off the diving board for hours after even their dad was ready to go in. He’d play hide and seek, read bedtime stories with all the right voices, and make the best pillow forts. He’d solemnly teach them—over the fond complaints of their mother—that hating someone wasn’t right, unless that someone was some kind of godless Giants or Yankees fan, in which case it was socially acceptable to openly mock and ridicule them.

And Derek can’t be around his pack right now. He can’t be around these kids who, as important as they are, weren’t there before. They don’t know—not that he expects them to—about how close he actually was to his uncle before everything went to shit. Before Derek fucked up and trusted the wrong person.

So he gets up and goes upstairs, leaving them to deal with the mess of food. Someone—Stiles probably—will eventually handle it. He goes to his room, the same one he’d had as a child and drops down on his bed. Down the hall, he can hear Peter in his room, typing away on his laptop and muttering under his breath.

If Derek ignores that the voices downstairs are wrong, it can almost be like it was before the fire. The Dodgers lost, and so Peter is sulking because, despite his relaxed attitude in every other aspect of his life, he’s never been able to be a graceful loser when it comes to sports. Derek is up in his room, maybe pouting a little bit, because why shouldn’t he, and everyone else is mulling about downstairs. It could be what it was before. If he ignores how just about everything is wrong.

``

It’s Stiles who eventually comes in to check on him, because of course it is. Even if the boy weren’t completely nosey, they have been getting closer and closer through everything. Derek trusts him now. Trusts him fully with his life and the pack’s. Derek hasn’t said it, but he considers Stiles to be his second, the one he knows he can count on in every situation to act in the pack’s best interests if he’s not around. And even though he hasn’t said it, the others all seem to know it. They listen to him, respect him, and rely on him.

“Hey, buddy, how you doing,” Stiles asks, coming in to sit on the edge of Derek’s bed. Derek’s feeling a bit more emotionally drained than usual, so he doesn’t even have the energy to growl at him. Not that growling has swayed Stiles in months, but a man can dream.

“Hm, that’s nice,” Stiles goes on. “Don’t worry, I had the kids clean up the mess downstairs, but I really think we should have a talk with Peter about using our words to express ourselves, and maybe also give him double laundry and dishes duty for the week.”

“He’s never liked it when his teams lose,” Derek says, because it’s not worth it to draw this out with Stiles. Either they’ll fight and drag it out and have the pack choosing sides and Derek will eventually have to make some gesture to apologize and then tell him what was bothering him in the first place, or he can just get the moment over with.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Stiles says, arching a brow.

“No,” Derek says. “He’s never liked when his sports teams lose.”

Stiles continues to stare at him for a moment before he softly exclaims, “Oh.” Then he scoots until he’s lying beside Derek. “Back before he was a creepy stalker and murdering psychopath?”

“You just have a way with gentleness and consideration for other people’s feelings,” Derek says dryly.

“You push me against walls and leave bruises,” Stiles says. “And even though that’s been less of a common reoccurrence lately, I’m still calling us even.” His hand brushes against Derek’s. “I guess we haven’t been around after any losing games, huh? That caught you off guard?”

“He’s done it since we got the TV hooked up,” Derek says. “I just hadn’t thought anything of it until you all questioned it.”

“How—um—how different is he,” Stiles asks. “From before everything?”

“A lot,” Derek mutters. “He was—he was a—you’d have all really liked him back then.”

“That—that sucks, man,” Stiles says, his hand finally falling over Derek’s. “Having him but not. That just really sucks.”

“Yeah,” Derek says. That’s an understatement.

The problem with Stiles is that he picks up on all the little things. So in addition to the pack showing up for more and more baseball games, he’s figured out the sorts of books that Peter and Derek used to be into and the games they used to play, and he gets everyone in on it. He doesn’t tell anyone—so far as Derek knows—what he’s doing, and Derek has caught Peter’s partially suspicious glances. But in the end, Peter gets sucked into the game or the book or the movie, and it’s like being in a time warp. For a brief period of time, it’s like having his uncle back.

The moments don’t last, and Derek thinks that maybe all this is going to do is make Peter’s inevitable betrayal or departure or whatever he has planned all the more painful, but right now, it’s more than he ever hoped to have again. So he’ll take it. 


End file.
